It’s a rainy Wednesday night, nearing 12:30 am, but you’re wide awake. You have a huge cumulative test tomorrow for your math class, and you NEED to do good. You feel alone, upset, and stuck in your room with your notes, your calculator, and your fear for tomorrow. Where do you go to relieve this stress?
The kitchen. More specifically, the fridge.
I can guarantee that every one of you high school students has been in this situation before, whether it be a huge math test or semester presentation worth a third of your final grade.
We find a unique comfort in eating when we’re stressed; a comfort that can’t come from anything else. We call this: Stress Eating.
Almost everyone does it, whether you realize you are actually doing it or not. For high schoolers, the act of stress eating has become increasingly popular, especially as senior year rolls around and you are suddenly bombarded with college apps and senioritis and deciding what you want to do with your entire life all in the span of what seems like a split second.
But why do we do this? Why do we go to food as a comfort in our times of need? The reasoning is quite more scientific than you would think.
A study done by Harvard Medical School dives into the hormonal aspect of stress eating. When we are stressed for a very short period of time, our appetite tends to shut down (something you might not have known because it feels like we are never stressed for just a short period of time!). This short period of stress sends signals throughout the rest of our body to our adrenal glands telling them to pump out the hormone adrenaline. As most of you know from health class, adrenaline triggers a fight or flight response within our bodies. But, this state of mind and being actually pauses the desire for eating for that specific period of time. On the opposite end, being stressed for a very long period of time, as we all have experienced, can be very detrimental to your health and our bodies react in a very different way to this challenge. Once again, signals are sent throughout our bodies to our adrenal glands but this time, they are told to pump out the hormone cortisol. Cortisol can increase appetite and rile up our desire and motivation to eat. Because we are stressed for this extended period of time, our cortisol levels tend to stay elevated which means we have this prolonging desire to continue eating.
Seems fairly easy to understand right? Just some hormones here and there. But now for the information that no one likes to get told, even though we know it’s very, very true.
We tend to gravitate towards high fat and sugary food and drink items to combat our stress. Because of this, we feel a deeper connection with these unhealthy foods and they can actually make us feel as though they are reducing our stress levels when in reality it is just a lull where you feel good before going right back to the stressed mental state you
were in before. Also, especially as inexperienced kids, we tend to confuse our emotional hunger and our physical
hunger. Being involved in every club and sport you can be at school and taking all the AP classes that school allows results in an extremely exhausting day. Every. Single. Day. Our minds tend to go on autopilot and whether we actually want to snack when we get home, it becomes instinctual to grab that bag of chips or those fresh cookies that Mom made earlier and just continue eating until dinner or bed, whichever comes first. I am extremely guilty of this as well, making it difficult to tell myself too. It is important to take a second and connect with yourself to understand your true feelings, and whether you actually need that cookie or if you just want the “I’ve had a long and tiring day and I want the comfort sugar” cookie(s).
Because I know most of us are in the same shoes for this final year of high school and final year before becoming a true adult, I’ve included a couple of things that you can do to ease your stress instead of stress eating:
- Change your scenery
- Journal – both the good and the bad
- Get your anger/stress out by ranting, even to yourself
- Spend time focusing on your breathing
- Do Yoga/Meditate
- Sleep!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stay happy, stay calm, and stay healthy:)
Works Cited:
https://toomuchonherplate.com/ten-things-to-do-instead-of-stress-eating/
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/why-stress-causes-people-to-overeat
https://time.com/5347612/how-to-stop-stress-eating/
Stress eating is something I definitely am susceptible to, even though I like to believe I don’t do. I feel like especially with college applications and the large amount of homework I get every night, my stress levels are usually pretty high all the time. As a result I definitely do tend to gravitate towards comfort foods and sleep after school to try to relieve this. I do try to compromise by eating fruit, but overall I feel like it is important to stop stress eating, as you tend to overeat by doing so. One suggestion I found helpful was the change of scenery. This is something new that I learned, which I will try to do relieve my stress.